A choice I
did not make that profoundly shaped Almost Citizens was that of USC Gould School of Law to hire me. Here, I lucked out. Writing the book I wanted required
time, money, inspiration, guidance, autonomy, infrastructure, and publicity.
Fortunately, my home institution was well stocked with all seven. (If your
school takes a different approach to these questions or your recipe for success
calls for different ingredients, please share in the comments.)
Time was
what I needed most. But it was easy to overinvest in teaching and service. I
wanted to serve students and please senior colleagues, and there were so many
new, interesting ways to contribute. Gould protected me against myself. The dean
assigned junior professors light service obligations and never asked them to
develop new courses beyond their original three (we have a 2-1 load). Senior
faculty protested any perceived erosion of the norm. And I got a semester-long
sabbatical halfway through.
I also
found that my research, writing, and physical book all benefited from money. Paid research assistants facilitated broader
searches and more thorough reviews. Money for travel bought archival trips and
conference presentations. It took funds to hire development editors and improve the book through subventions. While I couldn’t spend my way to a good book,
I could have been starved into a weaker one. Fortunately, I had a dean and institution
that invested in scholarship. I never had a prepublication request denied. That
support let me put my best foot forward, plan with confidence, and avoid the
stress of committing personal funds to professional advancement.
My book
was also shaped by the scholarly cultures and institutionalized intellectuals
spaces of the institutions where I researched and wrote. It was while taking
part in Gould’s healthy culture of office, hallway, and faculty lounge chats that
I had many important epiphanies. I gained key interlocutors and inspiration
through my participation in USC’s Center for Law, History and Culture and the multi-institution Law and Humanities Junior Scholars Workshop that the center cosponsors. Gould
also gave me the chance to present in an internal workshop each year. And every
year the school’s senior faculty read and responded to all my works in progress. As a result, I received an additional
mountain of helpful tips and questions.
One of the challenges of taking full advantage of
opportunities for feedback at Gould was the knowledge that I was inviting
criticism from the same people who would vote on my tenure case. Fortunately, engagement
with my colleagues turned out to be a way to elevate my work while pleasing my
electorate. Gould’s senior faculty stressed that I should ignore any advice that
proved unhelpful. The dean repeatedly
insisted that it was the scholar’s job to bring critical judgment to the array
of conflicting suggestions received. Never did I hear a complaint that I had
ignored someone’s suggestion.
Gould’s service-oriented
library multiplied my research
productivity. Its librarians acquired obscure sources, secured high-resolution scans
of illustrations, undertook foreign-language correspondence with overseas repositories,
and filed Freedom of Information Act requests. Whenever I asked them to compile
reading lists, find statistics, create maps, or undertake targeted research, I
could trust that it would be done and done well. In fact, Gould’s librarians were
often better than me at finding sources and digging up facts. Having such skill on staff was the result of a decision to prioritize personnel above collection
size. But Gould’s smaller collection never hampered me. Interlibrary loan, mass
digitization, and the school’s willingness to buy otherwise inaccessible
materials always did the trick. The end result was that I saved considerable
time and mental energy.
When I
was on the entry-level market, it never occurred to me to evaluate law schools
in terms of their public-relations teams.
My mistake! After years of obscurity as a grad student, law clerk, and post-doc,
my arrival as a professor brought ready access to the public sphere. As I soon learned, I could give interviews,
discuss topics on background, write op-eds and articles, post to blogs, secure
press coverage and book reviews, do public events, send out promotional
materials, and much more. (I invite those of you more media-savvy than me to
take up the possibilities in the comments.)
I was enthusiastic to raise my profile and spread my ideas. But I
worried about PR becoming a time sink, or worse, about making a fool of myself
before a large audience.
Gould’s PR team helped me enter the public eye efficiently and on
my own terms. They took care of logistics, safeguarded my time, and focused on how
I could have an impact. They initially held my hand, practicing with me what I
would say and helping me set expectations with reporters. As my confidence grew,
my scholarship progressed, and world events unfolded, they had endless ideas
about how to give me and my work a broader platform. With their help, I
gravitated toward interviews and op-eds (a subject of an upcoming post). I eschewed
forums that treated intellectual exchanges as battles, and sought out those
favored conversational interactions. They even helped me be heard despite my
general absence from most social media (LHB notably excepted!).
--Sam
Erman